> after twenty years OpenGL was starting to looking like a bad abstraction: it didn’t provide the capabilities application authors needed [...] The Vulkan project was a long-running effort to define a better, more modern, abstraction

For someone who knows nothing but triangles=good, why OpenGL is a bad abstraction and how Vulkan avoids the same problems?

I'm by no means an expert, but my understanding is that OpenGL's API is designed to abstract away details of the underlying hardware, while Vulkan's API is designed to expose the details of the hardware.

When OpenGL was designed, the thinking was that graphics programming is hard, and so the API should do the heavy lifting and make the application's job easy. It turns out, though, that graphics programming is so hard that the majority of folk tend to use even higher level graphics libraries to write their applications.

The folk writing those graphics libraries want to make their libraries as optimally performant as possible, and the abstract nature of the OpenGL API stands in the way of doing that. They would rather just directly access the hardware. Vulkan is an API that gives that direct access, within the limitations of running in an unprivileged userspace process.

I still wish there was some kind of middle ground between OpenGL and Vulkan though, as an aspiring indie dev who’s making a 3D game without using Unity/Unreal (The reason for this is that for my game I need at least tens of thousands of simulated AI agents, and conventional gameobject systems aren’t designed to do this performantly.)

The Metal API from Apple seems to be just the right abstraction for general graphics programming, though it sucks that you can only use it on Apple devices. Maybe SDL_gpu can take this role once it’s finished, but till then I’m toiling away with Vulkan… yeah it’s still better than OpenGL, but its usability can definitely be improved. Maybe I should have just gone to DirectX 11… since the drivers there are ridiculously optimized.

Though I have my complaints about it, I think bgfx gives a good powerful-but-not-too-complicated abstraction over graphics programming; for some design info, see: https://bkaradzic.github.io/bgfx/internals.html